Thursday, February 07, 2008

Survival and Civilization

We were talking about the human condition in my literature class tonight. I was thinking about desires to survive ruling out desires to propogate the species. Food is scientifically provably more desirable than sex.

I was also thinking about women brains and men brains. They actually did a study to discover: do men and women think different? With exceptions, obviously, this study they did suggest they do in fact think different. Women think in sort of webs: their thoughts go all over the place, connect together, and centrally have a goal. Men think in lines: see a deer, kill a deer, eat a deer, live till tomorrow. Which implies this: Women drive civilization, culture, society; lasting things. Men drive survival from today till about Tuesday. We don't usually think past Tuesday. Wednesday doesn't matter that much.

Which makes sense to me. The first novel was written by a woman. In Japan, no less, back when women were denegraded to a really shameful degree. My opinion is the novel is the highest expression of cultural initiative. By that I mean that providing a cohesive and lengthy piece of fiction is by far mankind's most impressive act of intellect. Writing a novel is the heighth of communication. Communication is one of the things that makes us intellectual, and not just instinctual, creatures.

1 comment:

You like Tuesdays, don't you? I don't particularly. What do you find so special about them?

Anyways, that made me think about different approaches to writing novels--and stories in general. Really a story is a web, unless it is a very simple story, and I think the more interesting stories are generally fairly complex webs. So I have more thoughts about this, but rather than put them here, maybe I'll blog about them sometime soon.